Facilitator Cards – an easy way to start facilitation

As many of you will realise, I have spent a lot of effort trying to make facilitation easier for people. I am therefore somewhat jealous (hopefully in a nice way) of the idea of facilitation cards. Particularly because I think it it has been well thought out, and delivered with quality.

My hope is that, in sharing this post, a few more people will take that first step on a journey. A journey that will bless them and their people immensely.

Basically, facilitation cards are a quick and convenient stimuli for people facilitating a group to reflect on the tools they might use. They are the work of Meg Bolger and Sam Killermann of https://www.facilitator.cards/.

Their story says they developed them as index cards for a session where they did not know how it was going to pan out. So they wanted a quick and easy way to remember what they knew in order to make the best choice in the moment. This ultimately led to the idea of recreating the cards for others to do the same. As a result, you can see the complete set of cards here.

The cards provide the means for others to augment their meetings with helpful tools and techniques as needed in the moment. And, even more appropriately, people can also use the cards to lay out a flow for future meetings. The cards are conveniently writeable/eraseable to assist in this process.

Furthermore, the cards provide a useful mechanism for the group to take ownership for the process they intend to use. The cards are conveniently colour coded, so the group can narrow down their selection to activities which support: surfacing emotions; generating ideas; clarifying positions; and deciding practical ways forward.

The facilitator can make this process even easier by pre-selecting the most relevant options beforehand. Nobody says you have to be “playing with a full deck”. By giving your team the choice of which cards to use, you are helping them to think more strategically. You are helping to develop their leadership skills, and indeed their own understanding of facilitation.

It may seem a bit trivial to use cards for this. Indeed I made that mistake myself when I first thought about them. But this misses an important psychological point. The card makes the process tangible. Holding it gives a subconscious sense of agency. And placing it, agreeing it, gives a sense of responsibility for what happens next.

I heartily encourage people to buy a deck of the facilitator cards. At first glance they may seem a bit pricey for what they are (c. £80 incl shipping). However, their value is far greater. The economic reality of meetings is that they can quickly pay for themselves. Even within your very next meeting.